Antoni Tàpies: The Perpetual Movement of the Wall

The exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Perpetual Movement of the Wall explores the development of the artist’s work over the decade of the 1950s, focusing on the ways his paintings were presented at galleries and how they were perceived and interpreted by the public. Continuing the research begun in 2025 with the exhibition Antoni Tàpies: The Imagination of the World, which focused on the artist’s earliest work, the project presents new perspectives on a period of major changes in Tàpies’ artistic practice, with the aim of looking at his legacy from different standpoints. 

The project delves into four case studies of individual exhibitions (Galerias Layetanas, Barcelona, 1950 and 1954; Galerie Stadler, París, 1956; and Sala Gaspar, Barcelona, 1960) in which Antoni Tàpies presented very different sets of works, each of them set up in different ways. As Imma Prieto, director of the Museu Tàpies and cocurator of the exhibition, points, “thus, the interaction between work, wall and viewer not only conditions how the painting is seen, but also reconfigures its meaning. The work ceases to stand as an autonomous, isolated object and becomes an active element within a complex relational system that includes the viewer’s corporeality, the architecture of the exhibition and curating practices.”

The aim of this project is to partially reconstruct these historical exhibitions in order to focus on specific issues in his work from the point of view of the present, through analysis of how historical exhibitions were set up, to bring out the narratives implicit in the presentation of Tapies’ work. As Pablo Allepuz, joint curator of the exhibition and head of collection at the Museu Tàpies, points out in his article, “factors considered trivial, like the composition and colour of the display surfaces, the mechanisms of the physical layout of the works, decisions on lighting techniques and communicative resources, actually made up a whole structure of mediation that affects—or even determines—how we see and consider Tàpies’ legacy today”. Thus, each of the four parts into which the project on show at the Museu Tàpies is divided presents on the one hand a reconstruction of these presentations —in terms of the colour of the walls, the way were photographed or the formats reproduced, the way in which they were approached— and on the other documents linked directly or indirectly to these exhibitions. In short, an exhibition of exhibitions.

The show includes more than fifty works and a range of documentation from public and private collections. The leaflet presents articles by the curators and period pieces by art theorist Joan-Josep Tharrats, Catalan art critic Alexandre Cirici i Pellicer and French art critic Michel Tapié, and a letter to the editor of the newspaper El Correo Catalán. The contents of the public, educational and research programme will include a case study of “Materia(l)ment”, a laboratory for cultural thought, criticism and administration as part of the minor in Cultural Creativity and Practice at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF), within the auspices of the Antoni Tàpies–UPF Chair in Contemporary Art and Thought.

The Museu Tàpies offers visits for all audiences and all educational levels, as well as activity sessions for families, training capsules for teachers and the third edition of the Teresa Barba Critical Writing Competition for students and projects to make the arts experience accessible to all through programmes in the context of hospitals and mental health. The museum will be taking part in the latest edition of the "Dialògiques" project, set up by the EART—centre for mediation, education and contemporary art—, and in Dust. Collaborative Research Laboratory together with the Sala d’Art Jove. 

“Against the Wall” will offer a series of encounters and dialogues between artists, gallery owners and contemporary agents to discuss current practices in artistic output, exhibition and mediation, taking the wall as a place of friction, shared imagination and constant movement. The first session will feature artist Marria Pratts and gallerist Jordi Mayoral. The first edition of the “Archival Body” art research residency, set up jointly with Graner—Centre de creació de dansa i arts vives, will be publicly launched in June at the museum. This residency seeks to generate a space for exchange and experimentation between body-centred artistic practices and the contents of the museum’s exhibitions linked to its collection.

In partnership with the Antoni Tàpies—UPF Chair in Contemporary Art and Thought, the Museu Tàpies will organize the international symposium “The Wall and the City: Visual Devices of Modernity∏, proposing a critical interpretation of modernity on the basis of its material and visual devices seen as active agents of mediation between art, design, architecture and perceptual experience. The symposium will feature, among others, Jordana Mendelson, art historian and Professor at New York University; Juan José Lahuerta, Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Barcelona School of Architecture (UPC); and Beatriz Colomina, architect and Professor of the History and Theory of Architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture.